Bonus: Steve’s Extra Questions for McKay Coppins

Some politics.

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4

After sitting down with McKay Coppins for an interview (which Sarah concluded quite elegantly) about his new book Romney: A Reckoning, Steve decides to ask a few more question about Mitt Romney’s political life.

–The full interview

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  1. Avatar photo
    CP

    I wonder why there aren’t harsher laws on the books against threatening elected officials. Lawmakers certainly have incentive to pass them. Make it punishable by prison sentences, at least. Any threat of violence made against an elected official or their family, no matter how toothless, carries immediate consequences.

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  2. Avatar photo
    Earl King

    I often think how much better off the country would be if Romney had won in 2012. A decent man. Certainly a better man than me.

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  3. IHfraser

    On May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina, attacked Senator Charles Sumner in the Senate Chamber and beat him so ferociously with a heavy walking stick that Sumner did not return to the Senate Chamber until December 1859. Brooks' attack was so prolonged and violent that he shattered his cane, but continued to beat Sumner with the metal-topped head. Representatives Henry Edmundson of Virginia and Laurence Keitt of South Carolina prevented bystanders from coming to Sumner's aid by brandishing a pistol. It was a outsized incident, but not really an outlier.
    It took a war to wash the violence out of the official political life of the United States for at least a time, but it never left the substrate, as a host of movements have demonstrated over the intervening 150 years. The thread of hatred and violence that reached out for Charles Sumner in 1859 connects to the mob seeking Mike Pence in 2022 through a series of welcoming hosts from the Klan, to the anarcho-syndicalists, the Bund, the Weathermen, and the Proud Boys, just to name some of the best known. The problem of political violence in American life is not new, nor are its solutions, and the first of these is courage, both physical and moral.

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  4. Dave

    I don't remember who I first heard say it, but I know I heard it on this website - if the fear of violence from a candidate, politician, or his supporters is scaring you away from doing the right thing, it is all that much more important to do the right thing, precisely because failure to do so is to let the violent win through threat of violence.

    I'm not 100% on board with where Romney has stood politically throughout his career, but our government is diminished by its loss of his integrity through retirement.

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